Ugh. So on my main machine I have an older version of WinZip that will unpack omni.ja. It complains about it but it does it anyway. The new version of WinZip flat out refuses to unpack it. Tried the commonly-recommended 7Zip and it refuses to unpack the .js files saying "access denied" and also refuses to actually unpack the archive at all despite churning away at it and showing a progress bar of all of the "work" that it's doing. Or is this like that ridiculous CD burner built into Windows that spends an hour prepping the files and telling you it's burning a CD but it doesn't actually do it until you give it another command? Also, if this format that Mozilla loves so much was even remotely standard then why won't anything open it? Years ago I used IZarc as that was one of the few zippers that would create a JAR or XPI that Firefox would read, but of course it doesn't recognize the new format. Changing the extension to .ZIP actually makes it worse.

Aha! Irony of ironies... changing the extension to .ZIP allows Windows 7 to recognize it as an archive format and it opens it up and extracts it with no complaints. What the fudge? Microsoft actually does something better than 3rd-party software???

Yeah, linux... it works in there because i think that's what they are using to wrap them. They CLAIM it's standard compression and there have been several bugs filed against this but they claim there's no problem.

Maybe that's what I was using... WinRAR... WinZIP... grrr. Really tired of having to find a whole new different zip utility every few years for absolutely no reason.

patrickjdempsey wrote:Yeah, linux... it works in there because i think that's what they are using to wrap them. They CLAIM it's standard compression and there have been several bugs filed against this but they claim there's no problem.

It is technically within the ZIP specs (if you squint hard enough), but it's an extreme edge case. Most ZIP utility authors probably thought that no one remotely sane would use that combination of parameters so never bothered to develop a decode path for that.

Yes, unzip unpacks it fine, though occasionally complaining. However, when you make a change or add a file, create a new ZIP/JA file as updating the existing omni.ja with the zip command frequently breaks it (with or without optimization).

I don't know if the config/optimizejars.py script still does what it was doing in earlier versions (got removed some time between the 17.0 and 24.0 cycles), but you could "--optimize" and "--deoptimize" those files.

I've created 2 files "JA Archive" and "XPI Archive" for directly compressing to JA and XPI with WinRar.Download here.

Unzip and place the files in the SendTo folder (\<yourusername>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo).You don't have to select all items for compressing; just right-click an item -> Send To > JA Archive.exe.All the files, folders and sub-folders will be compressed.

EDIT:Aris, you don't need to rename omni.ja to omni.jar. In WinRar Options add "ja" (and "xpi") to the User Extensions.